Sneaky Little Buggers

On 25 November, I was killing time and surfing the web. Since I’m vain or curious, depending on who you ask, I decided to check reviews on Amazon UK. As I scrolled through the list, I noticed the prices were different for each ebook. I found this incredibly odd, because the UK price (and frankly, every price) is based on the US price.

Long story short, I discovered that the book was priced based on the dollar/pound exchange rate at the time of publication. This meant that months when I published and the dollar was not performing well, the price of the ebook in the UK was lower than months I published and the dollar was stronger. This created a variation of as much as 20p between ebooks in the same serious.

It also meant that the amount of money I made off the ebook was not equivalent to its US counterpart. I don’t remember exactly which Dreams & Reality Novel it was, but at the time of publication the exchange rate was $1.81/£1. The ebook was priced at £2.36. I make $2.74 in the US for each copy of the book sold. With this month’s exchange rate, I’m making less than $2.50 on the same book in the UK. In theory, $0.24 isn’t that big of a deal, but when it spans thousands of books, that small loss becomes a nice chunk of change. While most of my books were not that extreme in the exchange rate loss, all of them were unequivocally lower because the dollar is on the rise. Three months ago, it was $1.71 to 1. Now, it’s $1.52 to 1.